10% off all books and free delivery over £40
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

Pax and the Politics of Peace

View All Editions

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

Pax and the Politics of Peace Synopsis

Perhaps in defiance of expectations, Roman peace (pax) was a difficult concept that resisted any straightforward definition: not merely denoting the absence or aftermath of war, it consisted of many layers and associations and formed part of a much greater discourse on the nature of power and how Rome saw her place in the world. During the period from 50 BC to AD 75 - covering the collapse of the Republic, the subsequent civil wars, and the dawn of the Principate-the traditional meaning and language of peace came under extreme pressure as pax was co-opted to serve different strands of political discourse. This volume argues for its fundamental centrality in understanding the changing dynamics of the state and the creation of a new political system in the Roman Empire, moving from the debates over the content of the concept in the dying Republic to discussion of its deployment in the legitimization of the Augustan regime, first through the creation of an authorized version controlled by the princeps and then the ultimate crystallization of the pax augusta as the first wholly imperial concept of peace. Examining the nuances in the various meanings, applications, and contexts of Roman discourse on peace allows us valuable insight into the ways in which the dynamics of power were understood and how these were contingent on the political structures of the day. However it also demonstrates that although the idea of peace came to dominate imperial Rome's self-representation, such discourse was nevertheless only part of a wider discussion on the way in which the Empire conceptualized itself.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780198805632
Publication date: 20th July 2017
Author: Hannah Lecturer in Ancient History and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Institute of Cornwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Format: Hardback
Pagination: 270 pages
Series: Oxford Classical Monographs
Genres: Ancient history
Social and cultural history
Peace studies and conflict resolution
European history